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By Fancy Flours Employee Lindsey K.

Welcome back for our second tutorial in the Springerle series! We’ll be covering how to make a papercast using our beautiful House on the Hill molds. Papercasts have so many uses. Put them on cards, use them as tags, wall décor, ornaments… or wrap honey jars to make a personalized gift as we’ll show you today.

Missed our first post where we made Paperclay ornaments? See it here! You’ll also get a quick history of what a Springerle is.

We used cotton linters from Arnold Grummer, who specializes in paper supplies. Their linters are non-toxic so you can feel safe going from cookies to papercasts and back! Grummer has pages of ideas and a papercasting video that is very helpful for our visual learners.

For the darkened ivory effect shown in our tutorial: Use hot water, add two tea bags and let them steep for 4 minutes. The linters will dry slightly darker using the tea method than they appear when wet.

For color: Add colored tissue paper after you put in your linters (step 2). Start with small strips and blend. Add more until your desired shade is reached. Only use the tissue paper since it has paper dyes. Do not use other colorants. You can also add glitter for some subtle sparkle at this stage.

2. Remove the tea bags if you used them. Put a handful of paper linters into the blender and purée until it becomes a pulp.

3. Place your mesh strainer into the bowl. Pour a “pancake” of pulp into the strainer using a continuous, circular pouring motion. Make the pancake as big as your design. This saves you from having to reshape after the fact.

Tip: If the pulp isn’t coming out easily, you can add more water to the blender and re-pour.

4. Prep your workspace by placing a towel down. Have the sponge and drying rack within arm’s reach.

5. Dump the pulp from the strainer into your open, flat hand. Lightly press the pulp to remove some of the water, but you still want it to be very wet at this point. After pressing, plop the pulp onto the mold so it covers the whole design. (No need to coat the mold with a release agent). If you need more pulp, simply place it back in the strainer and pour more onto it from the blender. We used the Bee Skep for our honey jars.

6. Using the sponge, press out as much water from the pulp as you can.

7. Using a corner of the towel you’ve laid down, press the rest of the water out. Keep moving the towel to a dry spot as you press so that you can tell when most of the water has been extracted.

Tip: Make sure to press deeper parts of the design harder. For example, the bee’s abdomen. For particularly detailed spots, use your fingers to press the pulp into it.

8. “Deckle” the edges by placing your thumb along the edge of the design and pulling off the extra with your fingers or tweezers. This gives a fun, home-made look, but you can also use scissors after the mold is dry to create a clean edge.

9. Pick up the mold and turn it upside down. Gravity will be your aid. Lightly pull away all edges and carefully remove the cast.

Tip: If you’re unhappy with your cast, just toss it back in the blender and begin again!

10. Place your papercast on the drying rack and let dry 12-24 hours (depending on humidity). You can make as many casts as you have pulp in your blender by returning the poured water right back into it. The water will last 3-4 more handfuls of linters before needing to be replaced.

11. If you plan to color your casts, now is the time! After they’re dry, you can use acrylic paint, colored pencils or thin markers. We used colored pencils for this Cornucopia design.

12. Now back to our little bee! Gather your hot glue gun, honey jars, dried papercast and desired ribbon cut to the diameter of your jars. I put down aluminum foil and parchment paper to protect my work surface from the hot glue.

13. Using the hot glue gun, attach your papercast to the center of your ribbon.

14. Once that cools, wrap the ribbon and papercast around the jar and glue the two ends of the ribbon to each other.

15. Ta da! You’ve created a sweet personalized gift!

While I was at it, I made these cute napkin rings using the same method of attaching the cast to a ribbon.

Owner of House on the Hill, Connie Meisinger, created several other beautiful papercasts. Here they are for a bit of inspiration.

Directions:
Make the dough and cut out the rectangle puzzle shapes using the our Toast Puzzle Cutter. Leave each cut rectangle of dough positioned together to bake–do not separate the puzzle pieces. Immediately after the cookies are removed from the oven, use the Toast Puzzle Cutter to recut the puzzle pieces in each rectangle. Gently wiggle the cutter when re-cutting the dough to make sure you have well cut pieces. Allow to cool. Preparing the wafer paper: Using the Toast Cutter, carefully trace the interior shape of the puzzle pieces onto the Valentine Card image you wish to use. Use a non-leaded pencil to do this. Cut out the puzzle pieces with craft scissors. Frost your cookie with a smooth coat of royal icing and allow to dry. If you are unsure of the right consistency for the royal icing, please read our tips under the How-To section at the bottom of our Homepage. The royal icing must be completely dry for best results. Simply spread a thin layer of clear writing gel to the back of your wafer paper pieces and then “glue” the wafer paper to the cookie, image right side up! To ensure a smooth finish, turn the cookie over, wafer paper side down, on a piece of parchment paper for approximately 30 minutes. To completely dry, turn the cookie design side up for 12 hours. You can add a 3 dimensional effect by adding small sugar pearls, dragees, sugar decorations or edible glitter. To adhere, just use a small dot of clear writing gel.